Jules Verne ridiculed this novel for its flippant disregard of Newton's laws. The propulsion device H.G. Wells uses to get to the moon is reminiscent of "Flubber" from Walt Disney's The Absent-Minded Professor.

I remember a college professor dismissing plot as a relatively unimportant aspect of fiction. I can only imagine what the good professor would think of masterful plot constructors such as Arthur C. Clarke, P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie...

No matter how hard you try—and some folks have tried awfully hard—you can’t attach a simple label to Robert Heinlein’s sociopolitical views. Remember that this author won medals for fencing as a young man. You don't get those by staying in the same place for very long.

Forty years ago this week, science fiction writers were media celebrities—at least for a few hours. When Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the moon on July 21, 1969, his “giant leap for mankind” was not just a fulfillment of President Kennedy’s promise of a lunar expedition before decade’s end. It also validated the starry-eyed dreams of a legion of pulp fiction writers.

Long before NASA was founded, the ABCs of sci-fi (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke) and others of their profession had been chronicling the exploration of the universe in works of imaginative fiction. The moon landing was their shining moment, and the public recognized it as much as did the writers themselves. When the TV networks sought out talking heads for their coverage, science fiction writers were on the top of their list.

At the moment that Eagle landed, Arthur C. Clarke was sitting next to Walter Cronkite. Earlier that day, the writer told millions of viewers, during an interview with Harry Reasoner, that the space mission was a “down payment on the future of mankind.” After the moonwalk, Cronkite engaged Clarke and Robert Heinlein in their favorite activity—speculation about the future. The sci-fi veterans could hardly have been more optimistic. Heinlein refused to put limits on where space travel might lead. “We’re going out indefinitely,” he proclaimed.

ABC countered with Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl, pulp fiction veterans, interviewed by Rod Serling. Ray Bradbury, for his part, had always been more partial to Mars than the moon in his writings, and he proved to be the spoilsport of the day. Bradbury walked out on David Frost’s Moon Party, a peculiar British TV concoction which countered the news coverage of the historic events with strange entertainment, featuring everything from Englebert Humperdink to a discussion on the ethics of the lunar landing involving A. J. P. Taylor and Sammy Davis, Jr. Bradbury was so moved by the Apollo landing that he was in tears. The irreverence of Frost’s coverage was more than he could bear.

Of course, on this night Mr. Bradbury had no shortage of invitations. After leaving Frost’s “party,” he took a taxi to CBS’s studio, where the author was interviewed by Mike Wallace. “This is an effort to become immortal,” Bradbury proclaimed. How? “We’re going to take our seed out into space and we’re going to plant it on other worlds and then we won’t have to ask ourselves the question of death ever again.”

The grand predictions made that day proved premature, to say the least. Sure, the Apollo program was a success—even dodging a bullet with the aborted Apollo 13 trip to the moon, which unexpectedly turned into the most heroic chapter in the space race saga. But Apollo proved to be the end of manned lunar expeditions, and not the beginning of the age of space exploration. Who would have guessed that, after Apollo 17 in 1972, no more astronauts would travel to the moon. Here is one measure of how quickly things changed: a decade later, when people spoke of the moonwalk, they were usually talking about Michael Jackson’s dance steps.

Few people suffered from this turn of events more than science fiction writers. The whole sci-fi community should have been crying along with Ray Bradbury on July 21, 1969. As space exploration disappeared from the front pages, sci-fi lost much of its glamour and most of its readers. I would guess that half of the stories in this genre during the period leading up to the Apollo landing dealt with outer space. How could these same writers adapt to a world where rockets and astronauts had lost their luster? The authors, for the most part, stuck to their favorite plots of space exploration, but the stories rarely had the same pizzazz as before.

With the benefit of hindsight, we should probably admit that the landing of Apollo 11 was the end of the glory days of sci-fi. With the conclusion of the Apollo program, NASA became just another government agency, more bureaucratic than heroic. It is all too telling that the Challenger disaster of 1986 was the next time that rocket ships captured the attention of the general public. And the last time I encountered a space explorer on the front page, the “celebrity” in question was Lisa Nowak, the NASA astronaut who allegedly drove 900 miles wearing a diaper as part of a plot to attack a romantic rival with a BB gun. The case has not gone to trial, and Nowak has vehemently denied the news reports about the diaper. Tawdry, yes . . . but not quite up to the level of Dune or The Foundation Trilogy.

In the interim between the astronauts with The Right Stuff and the tabloid-ish story of Lisa Nowak, readers turned to other kinds of fiction. Amazing Stories, which enjoyed circulation of 50,000 during the mid-1960s, had seen it drop to 12,000 by the time of the Challenger disaster. The magazine folded in 1995, and subsequent revivals have been unsuccessful. Galaxy, which achieved circulation approaching 100,000 under Pohl’s editorship in the early 1960s, shut down in 1980. A revival in the mid-1990s lasted only eight issues. Many other sci-fi magazines and publishers fell by the wayside during this same period.

Let’s be honest, science fiction writers are much like stock market forecasters. When their predictions come true, everyone listens. Yet when the prognostications fall flat, their audience disappears. The space race was that rare moment when these writers seemed to be on the mark. So many of their other stories—about time travel, telepathy, alien invasion, nuclear holocausts and the like—never came true (thank goodness!), but for a brief period the rocket ship tales seemed plausible. The two most powerful nations on the planet were focused on getting off the planet. The scribblers who had been dreaming about just this state of affairs looked like sages.

Successful predictions about the moon date back at least to Jules Verne and his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon. Here Verne correctly anticipated that the United States would be the country to launch the first lunar mission, and also pinpointed that Florida would make the best launch site. He guessed the right crew size—three astronauts—and also came very close to the truth in his descriptions of the dimensions of the space capsule and the duration of the voyage to the moon. Few science fiction works have been more prescient in their anticipation of later history.

After Verne, almost every major science fiction writer tackled a moon story at some point. Lunar classics include H.G.. Wells The First Men in the Moon, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust. Clarke’s most famous work, 2001: A Space Odyssey, also relies on the moon for a key plot twist—a large black slab found near Tycho is the first evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and its discovery sets in motion the rest of the story. Yet it's worth noting that, seven years before Clarke’s book, Clifford Simak developed a comparable theme and set it in the exact same crater in his whimsical The Trouble with Tycho.

When the moon became just another piece of abandoned real estate, like much of Flordia after the subprime meltdown, the psychological impact on sci-fi was devastating. Many grand predictions had been made about the future of space exploration by these visionary authors. But not one of them would have dared to make this prediction—namely, that 35 years after the Apollo program, no trip would have been made to any of the other planets in the solar system, and no one would have the gumption to send an astronaut—or even a dog or chimpanzee—back to the moon.

Science fiction is experiencing a bit of a comeback these days, but the moon plays a low profile in the renewal efforts. The literary establishment has discovered Philip K. Dick. His novels are now included in The Library of America, and he represents a striking case study in how a once scorned author can be rehabilitated. Yet it is revealing that Dick rarely needed rocket ships to work his magic. While his peers were imagining trips to the moon during the 1960s, Dick had figured out there were other ways of taking a trip—ones that came packaged in small bottles or envelopes. His “alternative reality” concepts have held up well long after space exploration became passé.

Even so, it’s hard for science fiction fans to look at the full moon every month, and write it off as a failed cause. It’s been downhill for forty years, but it wouldn't take much to turn things around. I think it’s safe to say that, if we ever sent a team of astronauts to Mars or beyond, NASA and their suppliers won’t be the only sector of the economy to get a boost. A few dreamers toiling away at their word processors might get a few more minutes of fame.

Ted Gioia’s next book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, will be coming out in November.

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